General observations about the joys and sleeplessness that comes from being parents of twin girls.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Cooking Lessons

The girls are quite the little chefs. They like to put on their cooking aprons -- color coded to each girls' favorite color, of course -- and help Mommy make dinner or bake treats. While we were working on a batch of pineapple carrot muffins this afternoon, I realized they are not only learning a valuable survival skills, but some valuable lessons as we created our culinary delights. Here are some of the important lessons I've been able to teach the girls while we cook together.

Always make sure you have all the ingredients before you start cooking.

If plan A fails, borrow missing ingredients from neighbors. Repay their kindness with a sample of what you are baking.

Make sure the mixer blades are in the bowl before turning on the hand mixer.

Never wear good clothes to cook, just in case the hand mixer blades are not in the bowl.

Cracked egg shells are very difficult to remove from batter.

Twice as much butter doesn't make the cookies richer. It just screws up the recipe.

The same goes for twice as much sugar.

When in doubt, blame the children for the funky taste.

Always measure twice as many chocolate chips as the recipe calls for so the helpers can munch.

Any vegetable buried in a muffin with cinnamon is immediately better.

Butter and brown sugar mixed together is an amazing treat. One taste per child or else you mess up the recipe.

2 comments:

I agree with your "Ground flax seed goes in everything"... or as much as I can (my husband is always looking for what I've added). I have a coffee grinder just for flax seed, grains and food items (it never grinds coffee). Regular Brewer's yeast is bitter, but I've found grinding a few tablets of brewer's yeast and putting in banana muffins goes undetected (as does thowing in a few ground tablets of dessicated liver for iron). BTW, Spinach in brownies just makes them chewy (not so cake-like) - my husband even eats those.